More on the raid at the Syrian border

With all the smoke and little light in the mainstream press following up on the Syrian border scirmish, it's good to have additional info and some pointed questions about what went down.

After all, these people who died were just "collateral damage." Since we don't know them they aren't really real - are they?

Ari was right - we have to watch what we say

Did you know you could be fined for asking or reporting the origins of products? This could be expensive, especially if the product is made in Israel.

The Coalition of the Shilling

Sam Smith offers his own unique perspective on Dubyah's recent adventure. He notes that one of the problems with bringing democracy to Iraq is that those who plot such are operating "without notice let alone shame - in America's oldest colony : Washington, D.C. ", so that based on past experience real liberation for Iraq is at least two hundred years off. In a particularly good rant he takes to task those who are consumed with a smug hubris:

Of course, there is a patina of politeness in dealing with one's own with which you can dispense in the case of foreigners, as demonstrated by Michael Ledeen, holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute. Said Ledeen, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business." When you sit in the Freedom Chair you get to say things like that. And in Washington, they call you an intellectual for it as well.

Thanks, Sam.

More Mendacity

Read about 10 Appalling Lies We Were Told About Iraq. There's nothing new here but I'm getting a warm glow at how much of this kind of thing I'm seeing.

Dean Foreign Relations Speech

Yesterday Howard Dean made a major address about foreign policy that's well worth a look. It's certainly a clearer picture of his priorities than we ever had from Bush.

God Speaks TO the Flaming Bush

This is really TOO much:

An article in Ha'aretz reports that Bush seems to present his actions on the world stage as being specifically the result of direct orders from God:

According to Abbas, . . . Bush
said: "God told me to strike at al Qaida and I
struck them, and then he instructed me to
strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am
determined to solve the problem in the Middle
East. If you help me I will act, and if not,
the elections will come and I will have to
focus on them."

This is truely delussional on several fronts. Not only does he think that God talks to him - he thinks the can "solve the problem in the Middle East" and have it out of the way before the election.

What is Bush?

A pretty straightforward charge in my former daily paper says that Bush Is A Liar.

Torture: a Conflicted View

According to a report in The Independent the U.S. is using torture in its interrogation of prisoners being held at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The article says:

Privately, the Americans admit that torture, or something very like it, is going on at Bagram air base in Afghanistan, where they are holding an unknown number of suspected terrorists.

But another story in this morning's Washington Post has a headline that proclaims U.S. Pledges to Avoid Torture.

How are we supposed to reconcile these opposing claims?

Strom Thurmond Dead at 100

To appropriate a famous response, "How can they tell?" That someone as mentally and physically moribund as ole Strom could continue to be elected to "represent" his state is a real testiment to the sorry state of representative democracy in this country. Of course, thinking that Strom was in any way a bad representative because of his years is to overlook certain obvious facts. Such as, Senators like Rick Santorum who may be physically young but mentally have all the rigid, bigoted, closed-minded, reactionary, knee-jerk, vicious responses to anyone different from them and their own kind as we had come to expect from Thurmond, "beloved" in South Carolina as an unregenerate racist of the old school.

That his death coincides with the Supreme Court decision invalidating anti-sodomy laws leads to this intersting observation.

And an observation that seems to be appropriate:

'Course I'm respectable. I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings,
and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.'
- Noah Cross. Chinatown.

Molly Ivens at her Best

Molly, a long term observer of Texas political craziness, takes a look at the Bush administration's approach to "editing" a critical environmental report, and finds that what they have done (essentially editing the guts out of it) is dishonest and not in the best interests of the country. What a surprise.

Michael Savage Sucks

OK, just getting in the spirit of the day. Michael Savage is one of those people (sic) that makes one despair of belonging to the human race. He seems to have such a low opinion of most of his fellow creatures that I wonder why he doesn't just check out. It isn't as though he would be missed. Far from.

The Supremes Rule!

The Supreme Court today actually rose to the occassion and ruled that anachronistic Texas anti-sodomy laws were unconstitutional. Apart from the fact that consenting adults in the privacy of their own home should be free from government intrusion, it is obvious that such laws can only be enforced by infringing on the rights of individual citizens. Not a good basis for law. Justice Scalia, of course, had to prove himself to be a complete Neandrathal on the issue. The court "has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda," Scalia wrote. Apart from equal rights I don't have a clue what the homosexual agenda is. Maybe to be treated like everybodey else? Is that so hard to grasp?

Well Damn!

Blogger just ate my template and I had to choose another. All my links gone. Don't you hate it when that happens. Did I have a recent backup? No. Am I a computer professional who should know better? Yes.

Why do we have to keep relearning the same old lessons over and over?

Oh, of course, stupid me - the archives. Well, duhhh!

Time for some Uplift

Bill Kauffman has an incredibly good piece in CounterPunch about why he is not, despite its failings, ashamed to be an American. A lot of us who are daily vexed by the vile behavior of our seemingly out of control "leaders" need to hear this message, take a deep breath, and get back in the fight.

Iran or Syria; who's next?

While FOX news pumps its public up about supporting democracy in Iran and concerns about Iran's possible nuclear threat are a hot topic, we find that U.S. troops have clashed with Syrian border guards, probably inside Syria. What, is this like a practice mini-invasion? We can't establish order in either Afghanistan or Iraq but we do love to flex our military muscle at new "threats." Is it asking too much to actually finish something? After all, we wouldn't be trying to fix a broken Iraq today if we had finished the job in the first Gulf War.

Howard Dean D.C. Reception

Today there is a fundraiser at the Capitol City Brewing Company for presidential candidate Howard Dean. There is no minimum required contribution amount for the 5:30 to 7:00 reception. After his reception here a couple of weeks ago at the Take Back America conference I expect the place to be packed. I'll be there.

Aftermath Blues

A new ABC poll just published indicates that support for our continued presence in Iraq may be waning because of the number of American casualties in the ongoing sporadic fighting. A more disquieting set of numbers in the same poll, however, indicate that a majority of Americans would support military action against Iran to keep it from acquiring nuclear weapons. Am I the only one who thinks that it is absurd to want to attack countries that might develop nuclear weapons someday, but to virtually ignore those who already have them? If we really cared about nuclear weapons we would be doing everything we could to secure those in Russia, for example, that are terribly vulnerable falling into the wrong hands. Instead, as with Iraq, our narrowly focused leaders would rather use the potential threat of nuclear weapons as a way of manipulating public opinion and gaining support for otherwise unsupportable actions.

Meanwhile, Nicholas Kristof writes in today's NY Times about the growing power of Shiite fundamentalists in parts of Iraq and concludes that "We may just have to get used to the idea that we have been midwives to growing Islamic fundamentalism in Iraq. " Somehow I don't think that is what the Bushies had in mind.

And Paul Krugman continues his excellent but seemingly one man crusade to get people to pay attention to the deceptions that were used to justify the war.

Tim Russert vs Howard Dean

Anyone who thinks the press is not pushing a right wing agenda would have been disabused of that notion if they watched Tim Russert interrogate Howard Dean on Meet the Press this moring. Every topic was a grilling about past statements, changes of position, and charges of being too much like McGovern. I would really love to see Russert use the same technique on members of the current administration - all of whom whould have a hard time answering for their own words just months ago. But it will never happen. With Dean Russert contiually put quotes on the screen and then went at Dean as if he were the defendant in a trial who needed to be asked the same question numerous times to elicit the truth. Whoever the Democratic candidate is, it is clear that the media are going to Gore them. They will be treated to a whole different set of standards than that applied to the "Commander in Chief".

Another Excuse

Today in his weekly radio address, Bush presented a new excuse for not finding the fabled WMDs, they were LOOTED!. The excuses get stranger and stranger. Remember the extreme sense of urgency that Bush pushed about attacking Iraq before Saddam could either use or give away his horrible weapons? Now that Bush says they have been "looted" there is no real sense of urgency - despite who might have them (as if) - but he is now interested in historic research. As he says, "We are determined to discover the true extent of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs, no matter how long it takes."

If the weapons are gone, why do we care? We should care about where they are. There is something really strange going on here. What are these guys smoking?

Righteous Anger

My wife got an earfull from her mother in Tennessee today. We have a nephew in the reserves in Iraq - somewhere in the area around Tikrit. My mother-in-law wanted it to be known that she was very upset at Bush pretending that the war was over when people are still being killed. She was especially incensed that he pulled that publicity stunt on the aircraft carrier and has thereafter pretended that the "war" was past tense and seems focused on providing business opportunities for his friends while he focuses on image change for the upcoming election. Shrub seems not to have counted on the very serious consequences of what he has done to ordinary American citizens. There are today hundreds of thousands of mothers, father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, brothers, sisters, friends, spouses, sons, and daughters who are fearing for their loved ones safety and wondering why they are in harms way and even more - why is Bush pretending that they aren't?

We now know for sure that the pretexts for the war were lies. How can we justify the deaths of any more American service men and women under the circumstances? Keeping the troops in Iraq just confirms that our real motivation is controlling the country's oil and using it as a base for further advantures in the Middle East. The bad faith of this admisistration has been clear to most of the rest of the world for some time. When will the American public wake up?

Perception Versus Reality

How can we have a government of the people when a majority of the people refuse to inform themselves and are willing to believe absolute nonsense? The Bush Administration realized early that if it said something often enough, no one would seriously challange them if what they were doing was just the opposite. I'm not sure why this is so, but Bush has, since his campaign for the Presidency, lied repeatedly and forcefully - yet the media has seldom called him on it and when it has the public hasn't seemed to care:

No child left behind really means cutting education budgets while saddling the States with billions of dollars in mandated testing

Praising our fine armed services means cutting money for military families and medical coverage for veterans

Supporting Free Enterprise means huge dollar giveaways to big business

The "Clean Skies" program means letting polluting industries police themselves

The "Healthy Forest" program means letting logging companies cut more trees in Federal Forests and National Parks

The War on Terrorism really means making war on other countries that can help secure American hegemony and ignoring those countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that truely harbor and support terrorists but are good business partners

The Patriot Act really means protecting our freedoms by denying them

The Deptartment of Homeland Security pays little attention to homeland security (money for port and harbor security is actually cut) but is used instead as an assault on labor by denying Civil Service collective bargaining protection to thousands of workers

His "Jobs and Growth" program consists of more tax cuts for the well off, with no evidence from the first rounds of tax cuts that they produced either jobs (3 million have been lost since Bush was sworn in as president) or growth (the economy is growing more slowly than the increase in population)

This man who calls himself a "Compassionate Conservative" shows neither compassion nor conservatism in his behavior. If he were truely compassionate he might have paused before starting a war on trumpted up evidence. If he were really a conservative he wouldn't blithly pile up record levels of federal deficits just to give a tax cut to those who already have a lot of money. Yet a recent poll indicates that a majority of the public believes he is doing a good job. Of course, a majority of these people also still think that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction that miraculously disappeard. Indeed, some actually believe such weapons were used during the waqr. These would be the same ones who believe that Elvis is still alive. We have to hope that while they are free to believe any stupid thing they want that they don't vote.

The Wrong Question

While I'm glad there is some attention being paid to the Bush administration's credibility problems with WMDs as a rationale for the Irag War, I am concerned that this is not the real issue. Suppose Saddam had all the WMD's Powell outlined in his UN presentation - SO WHAT? He would have been one of many heads of state in possession of weapons overkill potential. Bush would have led the list of such heads of state. Since when does possession of serious weapons of this kind justify preemtory attacks? We were so sure he had these weapons because we sold them to him. So, if we were so concerned about them, why did we sell them to him in the first place? Why did his possession of them become so important after more than a decade when he had made no threatening noise to anyone?

The whole Bush rationale for war was preposterous. Iraq was not a threat to anyone - certainly not the US. Rather, Iraq was weak and a potentially rich prize. The plan and ratonale for conquering Iraq was laid out in great detail years before by the Project for the New American Century. The idea was to use Iraq as an example to other middle eastern countries and to physically use it as a base for consolidating and expanding American power in the region.

The blatant hypocracy of our stated policy in opposition to our actions is clear to the rest of the world. To American citizens of the Fox News persuasion, however, Afghanistan and Irag are "free". What this means in practice is a matter some dispute.

America as PR Project

THE ROOTS OF BUSH PROPAGANDA..."The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible goverrnment which is the true ruling power of our country....Whatever attitude one chooses to take toward this condition, it remains a fact that in almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses." --Edward Bernays, 1928, U.S.A.

This makes me feel sooo much better - knowing that those "who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses" are in charge. As one of the understood masses I am so thankful that I don't have to actually understand anything for myself. What a relief! Now I can go back to fretting over American Idol.

Or, as Sheridan Whiteside says in "The Man Who Came To Dinner" - - - I may vomit.

The $Cost$ of War

I saw a headline yesterday (USA Today?) that said War Cost Less than Expected. Really? How would we know since the Bush administration consistently refused to speculate on what the war would cost. Besides, what sense does it make to talk about what the war cost in past tense terms when the fighting and dying continue on a daily basis - we lost another helicopter yesterday - and no one can say how long this will go on. And is the cost of future Iraqi reconstruction, only partially to be offset by the sale of Iraqi oil, not considered part of the cost? I would be very surprised if the cost, once all is said and done, is not much, much higher than anyone in this administration has publicly predicted, whatever they may think in private.

And if our actions in Iraq cause other countries to increase unconventional arms in self-defense - as it seems North Korea is doing - is that not to be considered part of the 'cost' of this war? And is the bribe money and other sweeteners used by the Bush administration to buy consent from its sad allies in this affair being counted as part of the cost?

It's good to keep in mind that what things cost in America is deceptive. Gas for those thirsty SUVs for example. It has been estimated that if we acknowledged the amount of money spent by the government to insure our supply of 'cheap' oil the actual cost to consumers would be over $10 a gallon. That we pay only a little over a dollar a gallon at the pump and the rest in taxes doesn't change the fact that gasoline is much more expensive for us than we think. It is to someone's advantage to keep us thinking that gas is cheap. There is a real lesson here if we are willing to look.

The Roadmap to Hell

On this Friday the 13th I would give a great deal to be more optimistic, but experience doesn't support optimism, especially about the prospects for peace in the middle east. The bad faith "roadmap" pushed by the Bush administration is the same old unrealistic set of high level steps that sound easy but are probably functionally impossible. Palestinian violence is supposed to stop. "Illegal" settlements in the occupied territories are supposed to stop. THEN we talk about a Palestinian state. Why is this bullshit?

1. The Palestinian Authority that is charged with stopping the violence is not in control of the violence. Hamas and PLO elements will continue to use terrorism to thwart the "peace process" because they don't trust the forces arrayed against them,

2. Stopping "illegal settlements" is not a big deal for the Israelis. The LEGAL settlements (defined as those sponsered by the Israeli government) are the real problem. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been settled in improvised towns deliberately placed to cut up Palestinian land, control water access, restrict Palestinian travel, etc.

3. Anyone with half a brain can look at a map of the occupied territory and try to imagine how one could define a Palestinian "State" with contiguous borders with all those settlements scattered like a bad case of acne across the whole face of the land; it would look like some tortured gerrymandered district divised by Tom Delay,

4. So what can happen here? What happened in America between the "civilized" invaders and the original inhabitants? Same thing is in the offing in Israel. Don't doubt it. You don't have to dig very deep to find overt sentiment expressed by prominent Israeli politicians that makes it clear that the Palestinians are to be "removed" - either killed or expelled to other countries. That this is genocide is clear, but to say so is SO impolitic in today's America. We have to pretend that the Israelis are the good guys - despite daily evidence to the contrary.

The previous points seem obvious and because of that I have a great deal of trouble pretending that what I see on network TV and what I read in the major print media is true and an actual reflection of reality. In fact, what is put forward is a bad fiction that hardly stands serious analysis. Only those who don't want to be troubled and are willing to be deceived in the service of their own peace of mind could believe such lame nonsense.